Thursday, August 18, 2016

Just added a very LONG page about how to create custom materials in Clip Studio Paint. Ho-hum right? Except I figured out how you can collect them into "packs" that allow you to back them up (including how you organized them in your Materials Palette) and - this is the biggie - SHARE them with other users!

Clip Studio Paint is just one app in an entire suite of creativity apps, and for users in Japan there is a robust marketplace of additional materials available for free, purchase, or licensing - and users can share or sell their own, original materials too. Sadly, so far, the rest of us CSP is the only part of the suite we get and there is no native materials marketplace for anyone outside of Japan. Neither the original software publisher, Celsys, nor their North American distributor Smith Micro, seem particularly interested in establishing such a marketplace for us either.

CSP has options in it to easily export your custom brushes or color sets, but anything that is "registered" as a material in the Materials Palette was not something you could export...until NOW!

I spent about a week trying different things and trying to figure out what the Materials Installer Utility actually does. I'm about 99% certain those of us outside of Japan now have a safe, manual method for building, distributing, sharing, installing, and uninstalling custom Materials Packs.

As part of this I also put together some experimental Materials Packs for testing as as a proof of concept. Among them is a pack with 3D materials in it - notably my 3D Character Model project "Caveman Grunk" - but the pack also includes a 3D Background model, 3D Object model of his club, and 2D Background Illustration. It's mostly to demonstrate how you can bundle a whole bunch of related materials together and distribute them.

Also, since I originally posted the 6-part article on my experiments trying to make and import models to Clip Studio Paint I've had numerous people ask if they could have the original Grunk model or Coordinate file so they could see how the hell I put it all together. Well, somewhat reluctantly, I decided to finally release all the source materials that went into making him. As long as I was at it I included the source materials for his 3D Club, 3D House, and the 2D background in the hope that will be enough to help other people see how the things in the Caveman Grunk Pack were assembled.